


keep on (haunting me)

by brophigenia



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Book 2: The Dream Thieves, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Ghost Sex, M/M, Masturbation, Non-Sexual Intimacy, because you can't get it up when you're made of ectoplasm, ghost boyfriends, it's just not a Thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-22
Updated: 2018-12-22
Packaged: 2019-09-25 01:15:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17111690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brophigenia/pseuds/brophigenia
Summary: “You’ve never even heard decent music,” Proko whispered, and twined their fingers together at their sides. “You think Blink-182 is the shit, man. What about fuckin’, like, Pharaoh? Mnogoznaal?”“I can’t evenspellthat. And Mark Hoppus is a golden god,” Noah replied.(AKA, Noah and Prokopenko, ghost boyfriends.)





	keep on (haunting me)

**Author's Note:**

> listen, this is the equivalent of making arthouse films; only a few of you guys are gonna read it, and even fewer will comment. ghost boyfriends are love. ghost boyfriends are (not) life.

_ *** _

_ cause i’m through being cool _

_ and he keeps telling everyone about me _

_ (yeah, like how i’m such a fool.)  _

***

“He’s not ever gonna be  _ yours, _ yknow,” Prokopenko murmured, winding around Noah like a slinking tomcat, all whitewhite teeth and ever-present  _ dripdripdrip _ of blood from the always-pouring wound in his throat. Feral to a fault. Noah snorted, jostling him off with a shake of his shoulders. 

“I’m still better off than  _ you,”  _ he pointed out meanly, more vicious than he’d ever have considered being when he was—

when he was alive. 

Prokopenko only laughed, anyway, amused to the point of hyena-like hysteria. “Really?” He asked. “Is  _ that  _ what you think?” 

They both looked to where Ronan and Kavinsky were circling each other like rabid raccoons fighting over a particularly choice trashcan. The forgery was waiting, hanging out the passenger side window of the Evo with his mouth gaping and wet like he was both struck dumb and begging for a good tonsil ramming. 

“Fuckin’  _ nasty,”  _ Proko mumbled, hands flexing into fists at his sides. Noah privately agreed. 

Kavinsky swung first; his mouth was a yawning maw of sharp teeth and quicksilver tongue, bubbling over with a manic laugh. Ronan swung second, and they both fell to the ground with the force of his malice. 

The forgery pouted at being kept waiting; Prokopenko left Noah’s side to slink over to the forgery. His hands were still balled. It was the oddest sight. 

Prokopenko, tall and gaunt with cheekbones that could cut glass, made a horrorshow by the gash in his throat and the flatness of his eyes. A ghost in every sense of the word. 

The forgery, tall and gaunt with cheekbones that could cut glass, made into a sanctimonious memorial by the openness of his thighs and the vacant vapidity of his eyes. A placeholder. 

Prokopenko’s mouth drew into a sneer. He picked up a rock and flung it violently at the two scrapping Dreamers rolling around on the concrete. It struck Kavinsky square in the temple; he blacked out for a moment, giving Ronan the final advantage he needed to come out on top. 

The back of Ronan's black tank top was twisted up until the dimples above his ass were visible. Noah thought for a second about licking over them. He also thought about throwing a rock of his own. It sure seemed to pacify Prokopenko, who grinned smug and vicious at the sight of Kavinsky’s face pressed into the asphalt, bleeding. 

***

_ the ghost of you is all that i have left _

_ it’s all that i have left of you to hold.  _

_ i wake in the night to find there’s no one there  _

_ but me _

_ and nothing left of what we were at all.  _

_ *** _

“He remembers me,” Prokopenko pointed out, draped lazily over Noah’s bed, neither of them corporeal, existing instead in the in-between plane of invisibility and secrets. “He knew me when I was alive.” 

Noah rolled his eyes and stared up at the ceiling. Through the walls he could feel all the life in Monmouth— Ronan taking a piss, Gansey pacing restlessly along the floor and mumbling to himself. He could feel their heartbeats. The air filling their lungs. He knew Gansey had a stomach ache (a usual occurrence when he was like this, tied up in knots from his hair to his digestive tract) and Ronan had broken his right pinky finger in the earlier scuffle with Kavinsky. He was probably looking forward to jerking off with it, Noah knew. A Catholic and a masochist both. Such a cliche. Noah yearned, metaphysically. Psychically. Spiritually. Whatever. 

“He literally  _ killed you,”  _ Noah pointed out, for lack of anything better to do. If he ignored Prokopenko then the other ghost just got into a fucking snit, pouting and breaking shit. 

Prokopenko grinned, the unsettling shark smile that Noah suspected was not a product of being dead but was in fact a remnant of being alive. He imagined the sort of vindictive, bloodthirsty yearling that Prokopenko must’ve been and shivered, sometimes, when he was alone. 

“I was his  _ first,”  _ Proko all but purred. His eyes were black. The wound in his neck  _ throbbed,  _ visibly. It was something Noah suspected Prokopenko could do at will, when he was feeling like being a gruesome asshole. “He thinks about me  _ all the time.”  _

It was almost wistful. Almost  _ sweet.  _

Noah sighed. Sometimes he wished he was the only ghostboy in Henrietta. 

***

_ hello there, and I’m so sorry  _

_ I cannot sleep, I cannot dream tonight  _

_ I need somebody and always  _

_ the sick strange darkness comes creeping up  _

_ and haunting every time.  _

_ ***  _

Ronan bolted into wakefulness with a thick bottle green snake curled around his bicep, long fangs sunk deep into the skin of his shoulder. He went still, predator-pale eyes flashing, and ripped the thing from his flesh with barely a wince, crushing its skull in his hand. It falls useless and dead to the floor, and Ronan was hard and bleeding and Noah was perched on the edge of his mattress,  _ looking.  _

“Noah,” Ronan said, low and even the way someone else might say  _ are you sure?  _ Carefully neutral. Ringing with golden tones, the way everything Ronan says is. Noah wished he could catch Ronan singing. He was certain it would live up to every insinuation Gansey’s ever made, clear as a bell and thick with ancestral remembrance, longing for a green-hilled homeland far across the sea. 

“This isn’t where I parked my car,” Noah countered, trying hard to bring levity to the room. To break this fraught tension, which had no place between them. Not tonight. Noah loved every square inch of Ronan Lynch, loved the strength in his shoulders and the curve of his shaved scalp and the squareness of his palms. Loved his scraped knuckles and his nightmares. Loved all of it. All of him. Enough to frighten even himself, when he was  _ More,  _ when he had spent a lot of time around Blue and was riding high on the feeling of  _ almost  _ flushing pink in his cheeks.  _ Almost  _ alive. 

Never quite there, but  _ almost.  _

Ronan laughed in a way that wasn’t a laugh at all, rough and strained and forced and  _ desperate.  _ Noah wanted. Noah  _ wanted.  _

Noah loved him, and he made himself appear right up next to Ronan then, pressing his almost-body into Ronan’s solid bulk, not quite enough for proper friction but close. “It’s okay,” Noah said, right up against Ronan’s ear, hushed. Feeling tender and sweet. Feeling almost not monstrous at all, in the dark with his bad cheek out of Ronan’s line of sight. “It’s okay, do it.” He urged, because he could feel how badly Ronan wanted to. 

Ronan gave in quick, with a mumbled amalgamation of curses and prayers, and pressed the flat of his palm against the front of his jeans, which he had not bothered to discard before he went to sleep, worn soft with near-constant wear. His hips bucked and ground, nasty-hot with his bleeding bicep straining under Noah’s translucent grip. Noah wanted to watch both his face and his hips at once, and so he did— he had no body, after all. What rule said a ghost couldn’t see two places at once? 

“Jesus Mary fuck, oh fuck—“ Ronan spat out between gritted teeth, tendons standing out from his neck. Noah wanted to egg him on, say  _ yeah do it come on do it,  _ but he also wanted to be absolutely still and silent so as not to miss a single piece of this. A single second of this. 

Ronan came in his pants with his eyes rolling back and like he could feel the strain in Gansey’s shoulders from crew practice two rooms away, Noah felt the agonizing fiery bliss of it, orgasm spreading like hot water over his crotch, his knees, his belly, the very back of his head. 

After, Ronan was slumped, still, eyes half-lidded and watching Noah. He breathed and Noah could almost feel the warmth of it. 

He could almost feel  _ everything.  _

“That…” Ronan whispered, harsh and low. Full of emotion. Full of life, cheekbones stained a hectic red, mouth bitten. 

Noah was empty, and wavering, and  _ almost.  _ He allowed himself to dissolve, disappearing from Ronan’s arms, his bed, his plane of existence. 

“That was hot,” Prokopenko commented.  _ Dripdripdrip,  _ his phantom blood went. 

“Shut the fuck up,” Noah sighed. His cheek throbbed. 

***

_ sitting out dances on the wall _

_ trying to forget everything that isn’t you _

_ i’m not going home alone  _

_ cause i don’t do too well on my own.  _

_ *** _

“So did you and ol’ Barry ever…  _ you know?”  _ Prokopenko leered, sprawled on his belly, chin in hands, legs waving in the air. His eyebrows waggled. He was a fucking menace. 

Noah, tired enough that he could almost feel a headache coming over the veil of death to strike him right between the eyes, bared his own teeth in an expression he’d never made as a living thing. 

“Did Kavinsky wait a while before he made that  _ thing,  _ or did he do it as soon as you’d gotten too cold to fuck?” The words came viper-quick, dripping like venom from his mouth. 

Prokopenko recoiled and then laughed, sharp as glass. Sharp as breaking glass. Noah tried to feel remorse. It was hard to feel anything, these days. 

(Prokopenko was fresher— had been dead only a couple of years, and hadn’t been unceremoniously bashed over the head with a skateboard in a fit of betrayed passion, besides.) 

“So you  _ did!”  _ Prokopenko crowed, hellish eyes gone keen as a wolf’s. “God that’s fucking sad— have you always been weak for tragic rich boys or is it just a coincidence?” 

Noah thought about any number of cutting retorts he could spew out, vengeful and furious. 

In the end, he decided only to roll his eyes and fall back to stare up at the sky, which was orangey with the dying sun and reminded him of the first time he’d gotten plastered— orange Fanta mixed with some  _ truly _ rank bottom-shelf vodka bought by some senior’s older sister, chugged in haste and very nearly vomited back up. He’d woken up duct-taped to a light pole in the middle of the quad the next morning. 

“Aww honey, don’t be like that,” Prokopenko purred, nasally and venomous. He crawled over— or maybe just appeared. Noah was not watching. He let his eyes fall shut. He couldn’t sleep, but he didn’t mind pretending. “It’s okay, we’re allowed to be fucked up. We’re, what’s the word? Fuckin’...  _ stagnant.  _ Never gonna learn from our mistakes.  _ Stuck.” _ He sounded out each letter in the word. 

Prokopenko sounded very young, then. Very young and very sad. Noah still didn’t open his eyes. He didn’t want to see. 

“You’re a drama queen.” He mumbled, and didn’t comment when Prokopenko snuggled up to his side, breathing noisily into his ear. He was doing it on purpose. They didn’t breathe unless they remembered to. 

***

_ i see you lying next to me _

_ with words i thought i’d never speak _

_ awake and unafraid _

_ asleep or dead.  _

_ *** _

K could only see him when he was so fucked up he was on the verge of death, himself. Every other minute he kept his eyes firmly shut to anything approaching  _ extrasensory _ ; luckily for Proko, K spent a lot of time fucked up to the point of being very nearly dead. 

He always cried, when Proko appeared. Cried and retched and swore he was  _ so so sorry, Ilya,  _ and Proko liked to see it. Reveled in the visceral reaction, every time. 

He’d stay the fuck away from the forgery for a few days, too, afterwards. And that always pleased Proko— the guilt clear in every line of K’s body, the forlorn confusion of the forgery, the knowledge that he was not just dust, not just rotting in the fucking earth, forgotten. 

_ Joey,  _ he’d whisper, and straddle K’s lap,  _ dripdripdripping  _ blood onto his clothes that K would scrub frantically at, weeping still, horrified still, for hours after. And he’d get so close, their lips almost touching.  _ Almost.  _ It was a word Proko had gotten very familiar with over the years he’d been… gone. Deceased. Here. Within, and without. 

“I’m so sorry, Ilya,” K would say. “I didn’t mean to, I didn’t mean to.” 

“Yes you did,” Proko would whisper, and gently stroke the hair that always wanted to flop down into K’s eyes. “Joey,  _ yes you did.”  _ And he would let himself look the way his body did, rotten and withered and  _ dead.  _ “You did this.  _ You did this.”  _

And K would try to fight him off, but he’d never try hard enough. He’d breathe the sweetly decaying scent hanging in the air; he’d clutch Proko tight with both hands even as he tried to push him away. 

He never wanted Proko to go. Not really. That was why he’d dreamt up the forgery. Why he reminded himself of his own sins, day after day. Why he fucked a facsimile of a ghost of a boy every night. 

Proko was Remembered. This was significant. 

***

_ we could be together…  _

_ if you wanted to… _

_ do i wanna know?  _

_ *** _

“They’re going to tear each other apart,” Proko whispered from the BMW’s backseat, and Noah swallowed thickly, a fully-alive gesture. In the driver’s’ seat, Ronan screamed and punched the steering wheel with manic violence. 

Noah didn’t agree aloud with Proko but knew it was the truth; Henrietta wasn’t big enough for both Ronan and Kavinsky, and Noah wasn’t sure if either could exist without the other. They’d come too far. They’d seen too much. They’d looked inside each other and found their own reflections staring back, and Noah knew intimately that that wasn’t the sort of thing you could just… desist. There would be—  _ could  _ be no ceasefire. 

Later, once Ronan had gone off somewhere Noah did not care to follow, he found himself again in the bedroom at Monmouth Gansey still kept empty for him, a place of his own to materialize. Or not. 

Proko was half a horror show, almost sweating, fevered with his long-congealed and disintegrated blood up. He tugged at his own hair, a peroxide blonde that would never be given the chance to go natural again. 

“You never did tell me how it happened,” Noah heard himself say, too-loud and yet silent. It had been too long since he’d seen Blue. He wasn’t— he wasn’t  _ there.  _ Not really. Only Proko could see him, hear him. Only something else dead, gone, buried. 

Proko gave him a strange smile. Came closer, closer. Closer still. Close enough that he could count each of Proko’s individual eyelashes, sooty-black. “Do you want to know?” He whispered, low, intimate. 

Noah did. Noah didn’t. 

“Yes,” Noah said, and wished he could take it back. Wondered if there was a timeline where he said  _ no,  _ if there was a timeline where Gansey had died and he’d only been concussed before Ringster came to his senses and  _ stopped,  _ if there was a timeline where he’d never even been born, where he’d never been sent away to boarding school, to his death in a place that hadn’t birthed him. 

(How  _ cruel _ life could be.) 

“He’d just gotten the Evo,” Proko whispered, words stretching out too-long and too-slow. Irrevocable. Noah would know, and he wouldn’t be able to  _ unknow.  _ “We were driving fast. Just us. Only me and K.  _ Joey.”  _ He breathed the name so tenderly, so sweetly. “He was just fourteen— still had a whole week to go before he was fifteen, and he didn’t—  _ we  _ didn’t care, why the fuck would— so we got a little fucked, and we got in the car. We—  _ he  _ was going so fast. There was a deer—“ here Proko laughed, a genuine sound coming from a specter, more effective than any tears or screams could’ve ever been. “And he  _ swerved,  _ and we hit the  _ tree,  _ and the windshield  _ shattered,  _ and he got caught by the airbag but, like, not me, right?” 

Proko stopped, and Noah could hear the sound of it, screeching tires and exploding glass and  _ screaming,  _ so fucking loud. Deafening. 

He reached out without thinking, fingers featherlight, and traced where Proko’s throat was gashed open,  _ dripdripdrip,  _ as gentle as he knew how to be. 

Proko trembled, and Noah didn’t stop, stroked over the very core of his being, his death. The center of him, where Before it had been his heart. He’d been born and his heart had beat; he’d died and now there was the smudgy, ashen rift along his jugular, not beating but bleeding, always. 

He didn’t offer to share his own story; didn’t want to speak the name  _ Barrington Whelk  _ in this place. Didn’t want to do anything but touch Proko, feel the intangible blood slick beneath his fingertips. 

Proko exhaled, a strangled  _ Noah  _ somewhere in the sound. Noah leaned their foreheads together and did not flinch when Proko’s hand came up to lay flat over his own death, palm to shattered temple. 

***

_ we found each other;  _

_ i helped you out of a broken place.  _

_ you gave me comfort;  _

_ falling for you was my mistake.  _

_ *** _

“You’ve never even heard decent music,” Proko whispered, and twined their fingers together at their sides. It was a pseudo-bitch that Noah knew meant he was afraid and didn’t want to show it. “You think Blink-182 is the shit, man. What about fuckin’, like, Pharaoh? Mnogoznaal ?” 

(How unfair, that even death did not mean the end of fear. Noah had been scared for so long he wasn’t sure what it was  _ not  _ to be.) 

“I can’t even spell that. And Mark Hoppus is a golden god,” Noah replied, the party line. Proko scoffed, sputtered, theatrically obnoxious to the very end. 

The field was alive with bodies and drugs and  _ fire;  _ Noah could feel the lurking menace of mortality on the edges, creeping in. Could feel  _ everything. _ The forgery was whooping, ripping around in one of the copied Evos. Looking at him made Proko’s face twist in something like pain. 

“My parents are dead, did I ever tell you?” Proko said apropos of nothing, urgent and low. “And, um. I never. I was never really  _ here,  _ yknow? Noah?” 

Noah didn’t respond. Didn’t want to. Didn’t want to acknowledge what they both knew. Nobody Remembered Proko. They knew the forgery. Only Joseph Kavinsky had known the real Ilya Prokopenko. 

“I just, I’m just. I’m not  _ done,  _ yknow? Noah, I’m not— I’m not ready—“ 

Had known him, and had killed him, and now stood laughing in a killing field of his own creation, the instrument of his own destruction soaring manic and wild above all their heads. 

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” Proko said faintly, and Noah didn’t turn his head when he could no longer feel Proko’s hand in his, kept his gaze fixed instead on the falling figure of Joseph Kavinsky, who had never been meant for Henrietta and who would never be meant for  _ anything, _ now. 

Nothing was supposed to be like this, except it was, because this was how the world was. Noah was not Barrington Whelk, and he was not Richard Gansey III. He was not a seeker, a leader. He never had been. He was the cheerful companion, the mischievous fool to two tragic-eyed young kings. He was a ghost. He wasn’t alive. And the dead did not get happy endings. 

He didn’t say  _ bye.  _ There was no reason to. Proko couldn’t hear him. Not anymore. 

***

_ it’s you and me _

_ and me and you  _

_ until we’ve got nothing left.  _

_ *** _

**Author's Note:**

> follow me @ brophigenia.tumblr.com or twitter.com/brophigenia


End file.
